About this project

Alteil Horizons is a turn-based tactics game with cards. It has the involved deck-building of Magic: the Gathering and plays like Final Fantasy Tactics plus Scrolls.

We are a group of game industry pros who used to work on the first Alteil. We fell in love with the game, but we wanted the freedom to bring out its full potential.

When Alteil 1 was slated to be shut off, we got the license and set off on our own. Now, we’re making a sequel to take what’s great about the first game and bring it to the next level. That’s Alteil Horizons.

Take a card game, add turn-based strategy, and bring it to life with stunning Japanese artwork and story-driven role-playing. This is Alteil: Horizons, the all new sequel to one of Japan’s most popular online card games, soon to be ready for fantasy, tactical combat, card game, and anime enthusiasts worldwide.

Four Gods Sleep Under Lavato…

Harness Their Power!

You are an Iczer, a summoner and master strategist tasked with protecting the world of Lavato from the forces of Batora, the embodiment of evil accross all dimensions. An ancient struggle between Batora and the four Old Gods of Lavato drained the Gods of power, sinking them into a sleep that has lasted thousands of years. But the Gods still influence Lavato from the depths of slumber…

One night, a new Prince is born, and the sun suddenly rises. Night becomes day, and a miracle is proclaimed. The Church of the True God takes advantage of the miracle to orchestrate the installation of the Solar Prince to the throne - and the ensuing power struggle plunges Lavato into war.

With the violence, tragedy, and death of the war, Batora’s hunger for evil and chaos is stoked - and he’s set his sights on Lavato again! But with the Old Gods deep in slumber, who will protect Lavato from Batora’s endless rage?

Now is the time of the Iczers. They’ve studied the legends of Lavato’s Old Gods. They’ve learned to command the Gods’ powerful Four Spheres of Influence. They’ve mastered the art of using these Spheres to summon heroes, monsters, and dragons to battle the forces of chaos and evil. Will you be the brave Iczer who saves Lavato from destruction?

As in any collectible card game, a game of Alteil: Horizons begins with carefully crafting a deck. There’s a universe of over 1,000 cards to choose from, each representing the factions, heroes, villains, monsters and magic of Lavato’s past and present. Your collection begins with any of four free 30-card starter decks, themed around the four Spheres.

Once you’ve challenged another Iczer to a duel, use your resources wisely to play your cards. Spell cards represent your command of the Spheres; unit cards represent your ability to summon heroes and monsters. Each unit is a fully fleshed-out combatant, complete with hit points, attack and defense power, agility, and range. Combat takes place on a battle grid - maneuver your units so that their unique abilities fit your winning strategy. And their abilities really are unique! A fighter with two swords might be able to hit two enemies at once; a mage can tap into your resources to play spells that wreak havoc on the entire battlefield! You have complete control of each unit’s abilities during combat.

A number of features set Alteil apart from the other online card games out there. For example...

Range based grid: position archers behind your front-line fighters to launch a ranged attack. Position your mages in the rear to protect them as they cast powerful defensive and offensive spells.

Resource recycling: when a card dies, you get back the resources you spent on it. Two small soldiers die? Use the Spell Points they originally cost to bring out something big and scary.

Revival system: if a unit dies you can spend a copy of it from your deck to revive it on the battlefield. Keep your best soldiers alive to execute killer multi-unit combos!

Soul Cards: influence the pace of the game by choosing your starting Life Points and Soul Skills. Give yourself stronger Soul Skills and less Life for a more offense-based approach, or give yourself more Life Points to buy time for a crafty strategy.

Day/Night cycle: as duels rage on, the sun rises and sets. Units like the Undead and Werewolves are stronger at night - while a holy warrior gets bonuses under the first rays of morning - so summon them when they’ll be most effective!

In addition to the gameplay features described above, Alteil will have a number of other unique core features that will set it apart as a gaming experience. (This is just the tip of the iceberg though, as our stretch goals will add even more onto this)

- Play on the Web and on your Android device

Alteil: Horizons will be a truly cross-platform game. At launch, it will be playable in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 10 or later - and we’ll have an Android app version too! App users will be able to play seamlessly against users playing in the browser.

- Duel Replays and “Spectator Mode”

With its beautiful artwork, action-oriented turn sequence, and epic fantasy combat effects, Alteil is fun to watch as well as play. Spectator Mode was really popular in the original Alteil, and we’ve made this feature even better in Horizons. It’ll be fast, smooth, and you’ll be able to easily share replays with your friends.

- Batora integrated into day to day gameplay - because Ultimate Evil is a game feature!

Players have always loved how the legend of Batora fit into the original Alteil’s gameplay, so we’re making Batora a standard feature of Horizons. Batora can descend upon the game server at any time, ambushing everyone online! As soon as Batora appears, the Alteil community is on the clock. If the community can’t tally a certain number of victories over Batora before time is up, there’s a game-wide penalty. But if the community triumphs, everyone online gets some free stuff! Batora is insanely strong (and insanely insane), but he usually attacks in some sort of pattern. The only way to defeat Batora is for players to compare notes, working together to decipher Batora’s pattern and defeat him in time. And to make sure things don’t get boring, Batora is NOT a AI opponent. Is Batora human-controlled? Depends on your definition of “human”...

- Earn cards just for playing

Earn new cards whenever you play with our new card collection system. The effort needed to collect tournament-legal cards will not change even as the number of cards in the game universe increases!

- Community-Created Content and Tournaments

You might notice Community Tournament System and Community Created Single-Player Content in the stretch goals. These are pivotal ideas for our vision of Alteil: Horizons. Ultimately, players will be able to earn rewards for leading the community and running events. Technically-savvy player can even create single-player content (and other forms of content in the future) to share or sell to other players.

We've been lucky enough to get some great press for Alteil: Horizons. Here's what they're saying:

Kotaku praised the team of artists, saying "Alteil: Horizons is actually an all-stars kind of ensemble title."

Massively.joystiq names Alteil a "contender in the ring" in the card combat genre against HEX and Hearthstone. Even better, they put us on the top of their list of crowd-funding projects to watch!

Examiner noted, what "sets this game apart from its rivals is the amount and quality of the game's art."

The Alteil Horizons team is actually two complete teams, one headquartered in Boston, MA (Apocoplay) and the other in Tokyo, Japan (Coreedge Inc). The US team has extensive experience in the trading card game industry, video game production, and creating and launching enterprise level software systems on an international scale. You can learn more about us right here.

The Japanese team is made up of well-established industry veterans who not only made their mark on the current generation of Japanese games, but had a hand in making many of the games the US team members spent their childhoods playing. The Japanese art team includes legendary artists like Katsuya Terada, Yuji Kaida, Shunya Yamashita, and Hitoshi Yoneda.

Here are some games and other properties our team members on both sides of the Pacific have had the privilege of working on:

Wizardry Online • Chess 2 • Yugi Oh! • Virtua Fighter • Star Ocean

Valkyrie Profile • Hellboy • Pacific Rim • Legend of Zelda • Xanadau

Tekken 5 • Marvel Bishojo • Godzilla Final Wars • Code Geass

Guilty Gear • Final Fantasy X • Phantasy Star • Secret of Mana

Transformers • Zoids • Duel Masters • Voltron • Mobile Suit Gundam

The Apocoplay Team has been working on the Alteil Horizons project for nearly a year with nearly no income, using our own savings to keep the project going. We have generous (non-financial) support from the Japanese team (who are the creators of Alteil 1 – and have been going above and beyond on their own time getting us artists and other talent) and we’ve been able to get the core battle engine on the launching pad. However, we are only 7 individuals, and those pesky grocery and utility bills don't pay themselves.

In order to release Alteil Horizons as a complete polished game that will wow players and grow naturally to a large player base – something absolutely vital for the PVP elements of a game like this – we need help. Many vital features are unfinished, like a core-set system (similar to Magic: The Gathering core sets) to ensure the game stays balanced and free-player collecting is fair, a marketplace, and as many tutorials and as much single player content as we can cram into it -- not to mention more mundane things like distributed servers to support a global player base with as little downtime as possible.

We don’t have funding outside our own pockets, because outside influence
on a game like this is, in our experience, a formula to be pressured to
introduce pay-to-win style elements. We’ve gone on our own so we could
bring an awesome tactics game to our fans without having to worry about
those pressures. To complete Alteil Horizons, a project ten years and
two countries in the making, we’re turning to you. You -- our
Kickstarter backers -- are the ones who can make this dream a reality.
Thank you for your support.

A Game Ten Years in the Making

Alteil was originally a Japanese game. We got at look at its first incarnation in 2006, and it had already been out for a little while in Japan (fun fact – oldest files we found on the original server were from 2003). Amid the forest of look-alike browser games that were coming out of Asia around then, it was a diamond in the rough. The core game mechanics grabbed us right away, and there were a ton of great ideas that we had never seen before. And as a digital collectable card game, it was way ahead of its time. Were you buying virtual goods way back in 2006? Didn’t think so, neither were we.

The game did get an English language version a few years later, and many of us worked on it in one capacity or another (the rest of us were busy playing it). It did okay, and the graphics weren’t bad, but we always knew it had so much more potential. It became the game that was always in the back of our mind. We wanted to bring it to more and more people. We wanted to be able to turn into something really big. If we could just get around some of its technical limitations and give it a fresh, beautiful, modern look, we knew it would be a huge hit.

Fast forward to end of last year, and the original Alteil game was about get shut off. We all know how awesome that is, to have a favorite game get shut down… yeah, we weren’t happy at all. So we decided it was now or never. We got together and started our own software company. We managed to get the license to the game and now we’re making a real sequel to Alteil. We’re building everything from the ground up to be as smooth, secure, technically advanced, and visually stunning as possible while preserving the core gameplay and great ideas of the original.

It’s been almost ten years since Alteil first emerged online. We’re incredibly excited about what Alteil: Horizons can become. Let’s make it worth the wait.

Thank you for reading!

For us, Kickstarter is the difference between putting up the dueling and deck building in a rolling Beta until we collect enough funds to add each improvement, and having a real launch of a polished game that will guarantee a large player-base.

I hope to see you all in the Alteil arena!

Risks and challenges

RISKS AND CHALLENGES

When making and launching an online game that can handle thousands or even millions of users, anything can happen is a bit of an understatement.

The key is having a talented - and experienced - team that can handle it. The software team consists of grizzled veterans of the enterprise space. On top of our gaming experience, our engineers' previous large scale projects include software for hospitals and the military.

Our project lead worked as an executive producer not only in video games, but also on film and TV projects, a cutthroat job where you make you dates or die trying, no matter what happens. A missed date can mean the whole project is canceled in those industries.

Between them and our crack team of developers and designers, risk and challenges aren't something that will stop us from doing our job. They're part of the job.

FAQ

Yes. The initial story mode is designed to teach players the basics of the game as well as popular techniques. On top of that, players may face various AI opponents.

One of our stretch goals includes expanding on that campaign, as well as a means for players to create their own stories that they can share with other players. Note that player made stories do not count as part of the official Alteil plot-line unless explicitly stated.

Yes. Alteil: Horizons is made in HTML5 and runs on most popular modern web browsers, such as Chrome, FireFox Safari, and the latest Internet Explorer. The demos in the video were captured under the Chrome browser.

While this does mean the game technically works on the Droid, the iPhone, and the Windows Phone, we moved some of the mobile support to our stretch goals so that we could create a more optimal user interface.

One of our top players won the world championship of the first Alteil with what was essentially a modified starter deck, so yes. The starter decks are even more powerful now too, and we will be keeping them updated to ensure things remain balanced.

While this was a problem with the original Alteil, it is not a problem in Alteil: Horizons.

In Alteil: Horizons you will be reconnected if you have a blip in connectivity. This won't give you the ability to cheat as your countdown clock will still be timing down. Messages received during that time will be queued up for when you get back online.

Rewards

$1 reward

---Tip Jar--- A vote of confidence can sometimes be worth all the money in the world. Thank you from the entire Apocoplay (US) and Coreedge (JP) staff.

Estimated delivery:Oct 2013

You selected

$1 reward

1 backer
All gone!

--BONUS REWARD-- Now, all backers at the $50 level and above get 50 slots for decks when deckbuilding instead of 20 with their Premium Accounts. (--This is just a placeholder to announce the bonus, not a real reward level--)

Estimated delivery:Jan 2014

You selected

$10 reward

26 backers

---Alteil Backer---
At $10, we’ll add your name to the credits as an official Kickstarter Backer, as well as invitations to any pre-launch events or betas. You’ll even get an exclusive Avatar for backers only!

Estimated delivery:Jan 2014

You selected

$20 reward

125 backers

---Honored Iczer--- You’ll get everything from the above Alteil Backer ($10) Level, plus we’ll give you all four starter decks (30 cards each) at level 1 to give you a head start! You’ll also get one complete Horizons pre-built deck of your choice (30 cards, $10-$15 value), as well as 1000 extra Gran ($10 value) to spend on whatever you want. Even better, you’ll get the following exclusive cards to play with: • 1 Obsidian Dragon Kickstarter Exclusive (not even available for the JP version) • 1 Zach Wiener (SMBC) Boulder Drop Kickstarter Exclusive (not even available for the JP version) • 1 TBA Super Mystery Artist Efreet Kickstarter Exclusive (not even available for the JP version)

$250 reward

2 backers
Limited (98 left of 100)

---Community Leader---
• Includes everything from the Lord of Sun and Moon level • Ten other accounts of your choice get 1000 Gran ($100 value), one 3-Star Triple Change card, and one copy of Obsidian Dragon (not even available for the JP version) • Give Community Tournament Prizes as if you were one tier higher.
• When a guild you are part of earns point cards from a non-community tournament guild event, all guild members get +5 Point Cards (Note, for multiple leaders in one guild it's +1 Point Card per additional leader, max of 10). • If you do not yet have one, your guild gains it’s own private sub-forum • You get a say in the creation of the Community Tournament System, User created single player content, and any other community based game feature in development • Unique Avatar Item to Leaders

Estimated delivery:Aug 2014

You selected

$250 reward

12 backers

---Keeper of the Archive---
• Includes everything from the Lord of Sun and Moon level • 1 Copy of every non-exclusive alternate art card (seasonal card - about 90 total) card in the game. • Every non-exclusive alternate art (seasonal card) released in 2014. • Every non-exclusive Avatar in the game • Two 4-Star Triple Change cards and one 5-Star Triple Change cards.

Estimated delivery:Feb 2014

You selected

$250 reward

1 backer

---Lone Hero of Lavato---
• Includes everything from the Lord of Sun and Moon level • Holy Aura - Batora skips 1st turn for life • One copy of each card of the first Altiel: Horizons Set (60 cards total) • Personalized Alteil lessons from one of our top players.

Estimated delivery:May 2014

You selected

$500 reward

5 backers

---Emperor of Lavato---
- Includes everything from the Lord of Sun and Moon level • 1 Copy of every non-exclusive alternate art (seasonal) card in the game (about 90 cards total). • Every non-exclusive alternate art (seasonal card) released in 2014. • Every non-exclusive Avatar in the game • Two 4-Star Triple Change cards and one 5-Star Triple Change cards. • Holy Aura - Batora skips 1st turn for life • Three copies of each card of the first Altiel: Horizons Set (60 cards total)

Estimated delivery:Feb 2014

You selected

$750 reward

0 backers

---Grand Community Leader---
• Includes everything from the Community Leader and Emperor of Lavato tiers. (only one set of the Lord of Sun and Moon level) • Two additional copies of Obsidian Dragon and one additional 3 star Triple Change Card to each of the 10 accounts receiving gifts from the Community Leader tier.

Estimated delivery:Aug 2014

You selected

$1,000 reward

2 backers
Limited (48 left of 50)

---Epic Hero---
• Everything from the Grand Community Leader level • Personal lessons from top Alteil player Worthing and Alteil game designer Logress
• 1 of each of the top 100 Soul Cards in the game, by use in high RP decks

Estimated delivery:Aug 2014

You selected

$1,000 reward

0 backers
Limited (5 left of 5)

---Better With Ninjas---
• Includes everything from the Lone Hero of Lavato level
• Commissioned alternate card art from Christopher Hastings (Dr. McNinja)
• Three copies of the commissioned card on three accounts of your choice (3 for each account)
• A large PDF of the commissioned image.
• You may add any $500 or higher level tier without a quantity limit, but you only get the Lone Hero of Lavato equivalent rewards once.

Estimated delivery:May 2014

You selected

$5,000 reward

0 backers
Limited (5 left of 5)

---Zombie King---
• Includes everything from the Emperor of Lavato level • Three copies of every Undead card in the game (90+ total cards). • Commissioned card art from Arthur Suydam of Marvel Zombies fame. • Three copies of the commissioned card on three accounts of your choice (3 for each account) • A large PDF of the commissioned image.

Estimated delivery:May 2014

You selected

$5,000 reward

0 backers
Limited (5 left of 5)

---Alteil Game Designer---
• Everything from the Epic Hero level. • Work with the Apocoplay team and one of the japanese artists to create a new card, new art, new abilities, all directed by you, that will become a permanent part of the game. • Custom Avatar by GGG

Estimated delivery:May 2014

You selected

$5,000 reward

0 backers
Limited (5 left of 5)

---Monster King--- Includes everything from the Emperor of Lavato level • Three copies of every Monster card in the game (180+ total cards). • Commissioned card from Legendary Magic Artist Nils Hamm. Three copies of the commissioned card on three accounts of your choice (3 for each account) - A large PDF of the commissioned image.

Estimated delivery:May 2014

You selected

$10,000 reward

0 backers
Limited (5 left of 5)

---Fifth God of Lavato---
• Everything from the Epic Hero level.
• Work with the Apocoplay team and Japanese artists to create a new EX Set, 4 pieces of new art, new abilities, all directed by you, that will become a permanent part of the game. • Work with our lead writer to create a story for this new EX: set that will become a permanent part of the game’s storyline. • One of the new EX cards will be based on your appearance, or the appearance of a friend.
-Custom Avatar by GGG

Estimated delivery:Aug 2014

Funding period

Sep 5, 2013 - Oct 6, 2013
(31 days)

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